Many purchasers making a large purchase, such as a house, car and the like, generally finance the purchase by borrowing money from a lender for a portion of the sale price. These lenders may be banks, mortgage companies, etc. The lender typically charges interest on the loan and may require collateral to protect the lender in situations where the borrowers cannot or choose not to pay back the loan. The collateral is usually, but not necessarily, the property involved in the transaction. In situations where the borrower defaults on the loan, the lender may exercise its contractual right to seize the collateral property and auction or otherwise sell the property in an attempt to recoup as much of the remaining loan amount as possible.
However, merely having title on a collateral property does not necessarily adequately protect the lender. For example, borrowers may wreck the property before the lender is able to reclaim possession, thus causing the value of the property to plummet. In another example, the property may suffer damage from natural occurrences such as floods, earthquakes, and the like prior to the lender taking title to the property. Accordingly, a lender may require the borrower to procure insurance on the property to protect the lender should anything happen to the property that may jeopardize the lender's ability to recoup the remaining loan amount.
Currently, for situations where an insurance claim is appropriate, the lender may have to wait a substantial amount of time before receiving the proceeds of the claim because of various inefficiencies. Moreover, the lender may be required to be an active participant throughout the entire insurance claim process. For example, with respect to a home foreclosure, the lender may be required to actively engage in every aspect involved in filing an insurance claim. The lender might first contact a field service company requesting a property review, and after receiving the results from a field service company, might upload the field results onto a website. Next, the lender may have to contact a third party administrator to determine whether the results of the property review justify the filing of an insurance claim, and if so, file such claim with the insurance carrier. Such a process may require that the lender spend valuable resources before obtaining the proceeds of the insurance claim. Indeed, the duration of such a process may be lengthened due to the fact that the lender is not in the business of filing insurance claims and thus does not necessarily possess the knowledge or the resources sufficient to file such claims.
Moreover, each party involved in the claims process maintains their own database or files corresponding to their portion of the claims process. Accordingly, when a party (e.g., a lender) requires information not found in their database, the party must spend resources contacting another party (e.g., an insurance carrier) to obtain the information, which leads to the wasting of more time and resources.